Penetration testing is a vital component of any organization’s security strategy. Thus, we will explore the ins and outs of pentesting and provide an in-depth look at the methodologies, tools, and risks involved. From network and web application pentests to vulnerability scanning and social engineering, we will cover all the topics you need to know to stay secure in the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity.
So sit back, and let’s dive into the world of penetration testing.
What is a Pentest Service?
Pentest (Penetration Test) is a controlled cyberattack that helps check for exploitable vulnerabilities. The process includes:
- Identifying potential vulnerabilities,
- Testing security measures,
- And analyzing the results to provide a detailed report on the security of the organization’s systems.
Penetration testing is not a one-time operation. It is a sophisticated, dynamic-lifetime process that is vital for organizations and must be carried out comprehensively by professionals.
What is Penetration Testing?
Penetration Testing is a crucial cyber security process that involves the simulation of a real-life attack on a system to identify and exploit any vulnerabilities. It is a proactive approach to ensuring the security of IT systems, as it helps to identify weaknesses before they can be exploited by attackers. During the testing process, ethical hackers simulate an attack by attempting to breach the system using various techniques, such as social engineering, network scanning, and manual exploitation. This is done with the intention of identifying any weak spots in the system’s security defenses that attackers could take advantage of.
The results of the testing are then analyzed to determine the effectiveness of the security controls in place and to develop a plan to address any vulnerabilities that are discovered. Overall, Penetration Testing is an essential component of any comprehensive cyber security strategy, as it helps to ensure that systems are secure and protected from potential threats.
Who Performs Pentests?
Usually the contractor “Ethical Hackers” perform the pentests. The test being performed by someone who doesn’t know the system ensures that all system vulnerabilities are exposed.
What are Pentest Tools?
There is a list of popular pentesting tools.
Tools for Exploitation and Collecting Info:
Tools for Credentials and Wireless:
Tools for Web Apps and Shells:
Tools for Vulnerabilities:
Tools for Reverse Engineering:
Pentest Methodologies
Many pentest methods are depending on the security system and the motivation of the organization.
The different types of pentest methods that a pentester can choose include:
a. Black Box
Pentesters have limited knowledge about the security system.
b. White Box
Pentesters are provided with detailed information about the security system.
c. Grey Box
Pentesters are provided with user-level information about the security system.
1.1. Network Pentest
A network penetration testing is performed by attacking business networks, network applications, websites, and attached devices by “Ethical Hackers (or Pentesters)”.
Pentesters assess the security of the target networks and analyze how motivated attackers can circumvent the target system’s controls by manually reviewing, testing, and exploiting issues to get to the actual risk posture, covering all aspects of the target system’s external cyber presence, networks, websites, public records, DNS, email systems and certificates.
1.2. Web Application Pentest
Web application security is the method of making applications safer by identifying, modifying, and improving their security. Security flaws are unavoidable, just like any other program errors. Web vulnerability scanners and other web security monitoring techniques may help in the detection of possible application security flaws.
One of the most reliable sources in web application pen testing is The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) OWASP works to assist pentesters with cheat sheets, web application security trainers, testing guides, and testing tools. But the Top 10 List is the most popular OWASP Project.
OWASP Top 10
The OWASP Top 10 is a standard awareness document for developers and web application security. It represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications.
- Top 10 most critical security risks to web applications.
- Most well-known project of OWASP.
- The latest version that published in 2021.
Pentest In Cybersecurity Process
2.1. What are the Phases of a Pentest Project?
- Scoping and Planning: Agree with the customer on the scope, timing, and boundaries of the project.
- Discovery: Gather information on the target from public sources, like using open source intelligence (OSSINT) to find personnel contact information.
- Vulnerability Identification: Use technical tools to gain further knowledge of the target’s assets, like using automated scanning tools to identify networks, hosts, and vulnerabilities.
- Threat Modeling and Exploitation: Develop threat models and attack scenarios to accomplish Pentest goals such as gaining remote access to systems or the customer database, e.g. using Metasploit to run exploits against known vulnerabilities.
- Lateral Expansion and Maintaining Access: After gaining access, test lateral expansion to simulate how far an attacker can go and if your security monitoring controls would detect their activities.
- Reporting: Provide executive management and technical reports that include business risks, technical vulnerabilities, and suggested remediation strategies.
2.2. Pentest and Risk Analysis (or Risk Assessment)
Risk assessment is the process of identifying, analyzing, and evaluating risk. It helps to ensure that the chosen cybersecurity controls are appropriate organization faces.
2.3. Risks of Pentest
If the Pentester is inexperienced, a pentest can bring damage.
Here are some pentest risks:
- The high cost of mistakes: If a pentest isn’t executed properly, the tester can crash servers or corrupt data.
- Unrealistic conditions and biased results: If the security team knows about an upcoming test, they may prepare themselves and the system for it. If the pentest is performed in an unrealistic environment, the results won’t be reliable.
- Time and scope limitations: Pentesters have limited time to report the results. This limits the number of exploits that pentesters can use. But hackers usually have unlimited time to plan an attack. Therefore, comprehensive testing in a limited time cannot be completely reliable.
Pentest and Other Types of Test Audits
Penetration Tests, Vulnerability Assessments, and Security Audits are usually confused when offered by security service providers. All of them are security terms, but each serves a different goal and they have different outcomes.
3.1. Pentest and IT Audit
While a pentest is a simulated cyberattack against the security systems, a Security Audit means evaluating a system’s risk level against a set of standards or baselines. Standards are essential rules while baselines are the minimally acceptable level of security. Standards and baselines reach reliability in security implementations and can be individual to industries, technologies, and processes.
Vulnerability assessment looks at how a system should operate and then compares that to the system’s current operational state.
Companies must construct a security audit plan that is improvable and sustainable. Associates must be involved in the process for the best result.
a. Types of Security Audits
There are two forms of Security Audits:
- Internal Audits: In these audits, a company uses its resources and internal audit department.
- External Audits: In these audits, a contractor organization is commissioned to conduct an audit.
b. What Systems Does an Audit Cover?
During a security audit, the vulnerabilities that may be examined are:
- Network Vulnerabilities
- Security Controls
- Encryption
- Software Systems
- Architecture Management Capabilities
- Telecommunications Controls
- System Development Audit
- Information Processing
3.2. Pentest and Red Team Operation
Red Teaming, in contrast to penetration testing, is concentrated on target objectives. Instead of putting a priority on finding as many vulnerabilities as possible, a red team attempts to test how an organization’s security team responds to many threats. The red teaming project will always concentrate on the objectives, seeking to get access to sensitive information in stealth, avoiding detection.
Usually, a red team project will lay out specific objectives and the process will involve a lot more people than a standard penetration test. In spending more time in scoping and needing more resources, Red Team assessments may lead to a more detailed comprehension of the level of risk that identified security vulnerabilities might pose to the organization.
For more information about Red Teaming: What is Red Teaming?
3.3. Vulnerability Scanning
Vulnerability scanning is a systematic and automated review of security weaknesses in an information system. It evaluates if the system is susceptible to any known vulnerabilities, assigns severity levels to those vulnerabilities, and recommends remediation or mitigation, if and whenever needed.
a. What is Vulnerability Management and What Is the Difference?
Vulnerability scanning refers to running a tool and getting a report of a prioritized list of vulnerabilities, Vulnerability Management is a cyclical process or program that incorporates the scan results to identify and mitigate cybersecurity risks continuously and proactively.
3.4. Source Code Review
A secure code review is a specialized task involving manual and/or automated review of an application’s source code to identify security-related weaknesses (flaws) in the code. A secure code review does not attempt to identify every issue in the code but, instead, looks to provide insight into what types of problems exist and to help the developers of the application understand what classes of issues are present. The goal is to arm the developers with information to help them make the application’s source code more sound and secure.
a. Source Code Analysis Tools
Source code analysis tools, also referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools, are designed to analyze source code or compiled versions of code to help find security flaws.
Some tools are starting to move into the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It’s effective to use source code analysis tools during the software development phase to detect problems. This is a powerful phase within the development life cycle to employ such tools, as it provides immediate feedback to the developer on the issues that they might be introducing into the code during the code development process. This immediate feedback is very useful, especially when compared to finding vulnerabilities much later in the development cycle.
b. Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
- Scales well – can be run on lots of software and can be run repeatedly (as with nightly builds or continuous integration).
- Useful for things that such tools can automatically find with high confidence, such as buffer overflows, SQL Injection Flaws, and so forth.
- Output is good for developers – highlights the precise source files, line numbers, and even subsections of lines that are affected.
Weaknesses
- Many types of security vulnerabilities are difficult to find automatically, such as authentication problems, access control issues, insecure use of cryptography, etc. The current state of the art only allows such tools to automatically find a relatively small percentage of application security flaws. However, tools of this type are getting better.
- High numbers of false positives.
- It can’t frequently find configuration issues since they are not represented in the code.
- Difficult to ‘prove’ that an identified security issue is an actual vulnerability.
- Many of these tools have difficulty analyzing the code that can’t be compiled. Analysts are not able to compile code because they don’t have the right libraries, all the necessary compilation instructions, and the code, etc.
3.5. Social Engineering
Social engineering is the art of manipulating people, so they give up confidential information. It uses psychological manipulation to trick users into making security mistakes or giving away sensitive information.
Social engineering attacks consist of one or more steps. An attacker first scopes the targeted victim to gather necessary background information. Then, the attacker tries to gain the victim’s trust and give stimuli for subsequent actions that break security actions.
Most Known Social Engineering Attack Techniques
- Baiting
- Scareware
- Pretexting
- Phishing
- Spear Phishing
3.6. DDoS Attacks
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disturb the normal traffic of the target server or network by overwhelming the target or with a flood of Internet traffic.
A DDoS attack is launched from numerous compromised devices, often distributed globally in what is referred to as a botnet.
3.7. Load Testing
Load testing in software testing is a non-functional testing methodology that is used commonly to estimate the performance of web-based applications, client systems or servers, etc. The test estimates the operating capacity of the application when its user traffic is at high volumes.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we’ve covered the topic of penetration testing. We’ve introduced different tools that could be useful in pentesting. We provided information about pentest methodologies and revealed the phases and risks of a pentest project. Understanding the phases and risks of a pentest project is essential for successful execution and achieving desired results.
We hope this information has been useful to you and has provided a better understanding of the importance of penetration testing. Be sure to check out our Pentest services to learn more about how we can help keep your organization secure.
